Kindof Maybe: About the Mind

Saturday, October 4, 2014

About the Mind

Over the last week I've been watching the next set of Lord of the Rings commentaries. It's the design team, and it's definitely been the best one yet. It seems that even in the Making Of featurettes, they had to pare down a lot of the information, so the commentaries aren't just a repeat of the same stories, it's all new! Lots of Richard Taylor's (the Weta Workshop Creative Director) slowed down, extremely knowledgeable take on the shoots, Dan Hennah's involvement with the miniatures and greens departments, and the concept designers Alan Lee and John Howe's fascination with the design aspects. Both not only designed sets, armor, and background pieces, but worked in the art department actually creating their ideas. Both are also extremely knowledgeable of historic time periods which much of the design is based off of. The Helm's Deep fortress of The Two Towers and the grand mountainside city of Minas Tirith were both fairly accurate to medieval architecture, and almost all of the armor and weaponry is authentic.
Yesterday I found this really interesting collection of photographs by Thom Atkinson showing the inventory of soldiers in different wars and time periods. As I am so much more enamored with ancient battles and the ways in which people fought (granted, I don't know what it's like to be in battle, but I find that older technologies made it much more of a personal affair. Like, you would need much more training and self actualization to stand up against someone in a sword battle than you would shooting a machine gun at an anonymous target from hundreds of feet away. It just seems that even though it may have been more gruesome, war used to be a much more respectful-of-the-enemy undertaking), I found the photos very intriguing, although I do think it is missing a Trojan War-like composition. See the article where I found it here.

Huscarl, Battle of Hastings, 1066